Climate change will cause glaciers to be unavoidably lost by the year 2050, according to a report by the UN.
A third of the glaciers in UN World Heritage sites will melt in three decades.
Glaciers in the US and the Alps will disappear as will Mount Kilimanjaro's glaciers.
The authors say that they will melt no matter what the world does to fight climate change.
As world leaders prepare to meet in Egypt for next week's climate change conference, a report based on satellite data came as a surprise.
More than 18,000 glaciers have been found in 50 UN World Heritage sites. They make up almost 10% of the Earth's glacierised area and include places that are sacred to locals.
The report said the retreat and disappearance of glaciers was one of the most dramatic evidence that the climate is warming.
One of the authors said that they hoped they might be wrong but that it was the hard science. Glaciers are a good indicator of climate change. We can see this happening.
Only if the world limits global warming to 1.5C can the remaining two thirds of glaciers be saved. The world has no credible pathway to achieve that, according to a UN report.
The previous report used models to calculate how glaciers would change over time.
Beata Csatho, a glaciologist from the University of Buffalo, was not involved in the research.
She said that glaciers were stable in the middle of the century. There is a fast retreat.
The glaciers that will disappear by the year 2050 are listed as a World Heritage site.
Between 2000 and 2020 the global sea level rise may have been caused by ice loss in World Heritage sites. The total volume of water used in France and Spain is equivalent to the total amount of ice lost by these glaciers.
Many people depend on glaciers as their water source for domestic use and agriculture, and their loss could lead to a scarcity of fresh water during the dry season, according to Prof Duncan Quincey.
"That leads to food security issues because they were using that water to irrigate their crops."
According to the report's authors, local communities and indigenous people will be hardest hit by the flooding caused by glacier loss.
We need to limit global warming.
"We have a message of hope here," said Resende. Most of the glaciers will be saved if we can cut emissions.
This is a call to action at every level, not only at the political level, but at our level as humans.
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